Scientists began observing the red giant star located 120 million light-years away, more than 130 days before its collapse. The researchers saw the star erupt with bright flashes of light as large plumes of gas burst out of the star’s surface.
“For the first time, we are witnessing a red supergiant star exploding! This is a breakthrough in our understanding of what massive stars do just before they die,” said Wynn Jacobson-Galán, a researcher from the University of California, Berkeley. Tuesday (11/1/2022).
In the Astrophysics Journal published January 6, 2022, the fireworks that come before the star explosion is a big surprise. This is because previous observations of red supergiants about to explode at their peaks showed no trace of violent emission.
“We’ve never confirmed such violent activity in a dying red supergiant star. We saw it produce such glowing emissions, then collapse and burn, until now,” added Raffaella Margutti, an astrophysicist at UC Berkeley.
Red supergiants are the largest stars in the universe in terms of volume, reaching hundreds or sometimes more than a thousand times the radius of the sun. Like the sun, these massive stars generate energy through the nuclear fusion of elements in their cores. (Read also; Historical Record, Hubble Space Telescope Has Operated 1 Billion Seconds )
However, because of their enormous size, red giant stars can form elements much heavier than the hydrogen and helium that the sun burns. As supergiants burn more massive elements, their cores become hotter and more pressurized.
Eventually, by the time they start to combine iron and nickel, these stars run out of energy. Then the stellar core collapses and ejects a gaseous outer atmosphere into space in a massive Type II supernova explosion.
Scientists have observed the red supergiant before it became a supernova using two telescopes in Hawaii, namely the University of Hawaii Institute of Astronomy’s Pan-STARRS1 telescope and the WM Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea. (Read also; These are 3 rockets that failed to send tourists to space, 2 of them exploded )
They had studied the consequences of this cosmic explosion, but had never seen the entire process happen in real time until now. The researchers monitored the finicky star for 130 days, until it finally exploded.
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